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Vancouver’s great lost hippie photographer Vlad Keremidschieff turns up in Australia

Four decades after he left town, former Sun staffer resurfaces Down Under

Former Vancouver Sun photographer Vlad Keremidschieff visited Vancouver in January last year after living for decades in Austrailia.

Photograph by: Ian Lindsay
, Vancouver Sun

One of the great mysteries of The Vancouver Sun is whatever happened to Vladimir Keremidschieff, the paper’s great hippie photographer in the early-1970s.

Vlad was the top rock ’n’ roll photographer in town during rock’s golden era of the ’60s and ’70s. He also covered many of Vancouver’s counterculture events, from anti-war protests to rock festivals and pleasure faires.

In the Sun files, you can also find some great Keremidschieff photos of squatters’ shacks on the North Van mudflats, along with pictures of former mayor Art Phillips playing basketball in short-shorts. There is also a funny Keremidschieff photo shoot with the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Unfortunately, the photos stop around 1974. Legend has it that Vlad set off for the south seas, and was never heard from again.

Enter Rolf Maurer of New Star books. A couple of years ago, Maurer was looking for photos for a book on Vancouver’s hippie era. He kept running across Keremidschieff’s photos in old editions of the Georgia Straight, so he typed “Vladimir Keremidschieff” into Google.

Vancouver’s great lost hippie photographer popped up on a Zen Buddhist website he runs in Sydney, Australia. Maurer contacted him, and Keremidschieff sent him some photos for the hippie book.

Then he sent Maurer something else — a collection of his photos, done up as a book. Hence the world has Seize The Time, Vancouver Photographed, 1967-74, a 124-page flashback to the flower power era.

You get a contact high flipping through images like a bare-breasted hippie mom at the Strawberry Mountain Fair holding her kid with one hand and a stubby beer in the other. Another pic shows a ramshackle hippie abode on the Maplewood mudflats fashioned from a tent and poles atop a foundation of logs. A pair of bare-chested earth people have clambered up a pole that sits at the front of the squat to unfurl a sail — it’s like a hippie pirate ship.

Keremidschieff’s rock stuff includes rare photos from the Seattle Pop Festival in 1969, a legendary happening that featured everyone from Led Zeppelin to the Doors and the Flying Burrito Brothers. The book includes dazzling photos of Tim Buckley and Gram Parsons in their prime, as well as a startling shot of a bloated Jim Morrison glaring at Keremidschieff from a helicopter. All three would die young, Morrison in 1971, Parsons in ’73, and Buckley in ’75.

His most famous shot from that time was an ethereal photo of Eric Clapton performing with Blind Faith at the Pacific Coliseum in 1969.

“That was the first one that was really popular,” recounts Keremidschieff, 67, who recently visited Vancouver. “People had it up in their homes and stuff. I would print it and sell it for five or 10 bucks.”

He took the Clapton shot as a freelancer, and sold it to The Province. But his main gig was at The Sun, where he had started off as a copy boy (messenger) in the old Sun Tower.

“A lot of smokin’ and drinkin’ was going on there,” he laughs. “People would smoke in the editorial room, people had bottles (in their desks). It was a bit of the old school in the old Sun Tower.”

But he left The Sun around 1965 to bum around.

“I was a hippie, hitchhikin’ around and stuff,” explains Keremidschieff, who was born in 1946 in Deggendorf, West Germany, where his Bulgarian parents had fled after the Second World War.

The family left Europe for Adelaide, Australia in 1948 or ’49, then moved to North Vancouver in 1954 or ’55. (Keremidschieff is not big on exact dates.)

He got into photography in 1967 via his friend Chris Ellis, who had recently returned to Vancouver from Los Angeles. Ellis had a Pentax camera, and he and Vlad spent several days taking photos around town. When Ellis went back to California, Keremidschieff bought his own Pentax, and went to Banff to study photography at the Banff School of Fine Arts.

Returning to Vancouver, he started freelancing for The Sun, Province and Georgia Straight. But his long hair caused some problems.

“‘Why?’ ‘Your hair is too long.’ I’m not kidding. I got fired because my hair was too long. Can you believe it?”

Luckily, he landed another gig at the Lions Gate Times, which was run by a guy named Cloudesley Shovell Quentin Hoodspith. Warner eventually asked him to come back to The Sun, so he did.

He got most of the rock assignments.

“A lot of the staff didn’t want to do it,” he says. “(The older photographers) didn’t want to go down to the Led Zeppelin concert, for God’s sake. They hated it, and I was young. So why not?”

Many of the music photos in the book date to 1969 and the ’70s, because that’s when he was freelancing and could keep the negatives. There are action shots of Mike Nesmith of the Monkees, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, and Paul Kantner of Jefferson Airplane, as well as Phil Ochs, Chuck Berry and Janis Joplin.

Alas, some stellar 1973 pix of Jimmy Page and Robert Plant at the Pacific Coliseum didn’t make the cut, because they’re in The Sun files, not in the two boxes of negatives that Vlad hauled around with him halfway across the world.

The last photo he had in The Sun was Bob Dylan with The Band in Seattle in 1974. He freelanced it, because he had quit in anticipation of travelling to the South Pacific with his wife Lindsay.

It was meant to be a year-long trip, but they never came back.

“We went to American Samoa, western Samoa, and Fiji, Tonga,” he relates. “In Tonga, we ran across a 50-foot schooner, built in 1910, I think it was. The Lady Sterling, beautiful craft.

“My wife and I got to join the crew, and we sailed back to Samoa. Then we went to New Zealand, where I worked in a bar for a couple of months. I made a bit of money, and we went to Sydney, and that was that.”

Some Vancouver friends were in Perth, so they bought a beat-up old station wagon and set off to visit them.

“In Australia, how can you not? Never mind that it’s 4,000 kilometres away,” he laughs.

His wife got a job at the university, Vlad opened a shop selling “hippie stuff”, and they stayed in Perth for a decade.

“When we started in Perth, it was amazing,” he says. “We had a two-bedroom duplex for $25 a week. You could buy a litre bottle of beer for 50 cents. I thought I was in heaven, it was great.”

In the mid-’80s, they moved to Sydney, where Vlad teaches English as a second language. He stopped taking photos in the early-’80s. Asked why, he sighs.

“I lost my Leica. It’s a very sad story — it breaks my heart to talk about it. I sent it out to be repaired and the guy just (screwed) it up, totally. Totally (screwed) it up.

“My wife came back to Vancouver, and she brought it back, ’cause I knew a Leica guy here. He looked at it and said ‘This is (screwed). I can give you $150 for parts, that’s the best we can do.’”

His old photos might have remained in storage if Maurer hadn’t contacted him. As it turned out, “a friend just happened to have a negative scanner, and he just happened to be going away for a year, so he just happened to lend it to me. And so I started scanning negatives.”

He has had a lot of fun revisiting his photo career through the book. He even had an exhibition of his Vancouver hippie photos last summer in Shanghai, where he was teaching.

But he admits his memory is fuzzy about a lot of the photos — he has no recollection of shooting Monty Python.

“A lot of the stuff I don’t remember,” he says with a laugh. “It was the ’60s, right?”

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